yikes!

Can we add tornados to the list...
 

The tv news is saying that about 10% of the houses in (Moore ?) Oklahoma have "safe rooms"

It seems to me that with the "tornado alley" reputation of Oklahoma and Red River Valley,
this % is very low, and I wonder if there is a belief that they are too expensive.

Safe rooms can be built to be "usable" in the daily life of the family.
So on a cost per sq ft, this is what FEMA says is average...

Since (unless the Republicans have killed them :rolleyes:) there are federal grants to help pay for construction, state tax credits, etc.

It seems to me that $10/sq ft is a lot less expensive than
the sq footage in the remainder of the house, either new or retrofit.

Yeah, building codes should be changed so that new construction in high risk areas has appropriate safe rooms. This is a failure of local and state government, which are the government entities responsible for building codes. There are lots of easy and inexpensive ways to incorporate a shelter in a new house, such as under the front steps.

You'd think people would want the the things but we all deny reality to some extent.

Everyone made it to the storm shelter except Dorothy. As a result, Dorothy has been famous for almost 100 years.

You too can enjoy her success. Have no storm shelter. Then after the next tornado, you too can see lions and tigers and beats. My My. How famous you will be once you've been to Oz.

WTF? We aint got no lions and tigers down here!

I've recently seen some docos about tornadoes and how the debris cloud can hurl objects clean through houses and stuff. I saw a nice big piece of timber (looked 2" x 4", maybe 8 feet long) that had punched through a roof, a few internal walls, an internal floor and the ceiling below, and had skewered a full sized fridge. :eek: Bricks and timber do not stop tornado debris.

Supposing a cellar is not practical, would it work to simply line one room with steel armor plate? How thick would it need to be? 1/4 inch? 1/2? an inch? How much would it cost to line a small room? Is there an additional risk of being trapped inside the strong room with a collapsed house on top of it?

For about $2k you can include a small safe room in virtually any new house. Entrapment is possible, but if you have a day or two supply of water, you can wait for rescue. A whistle can speed rescue.

Z, the US FEMA has download-able plans and drawings for several different types of "safe rooms",
ranging from cellar, to cell-lean-to, to outside cement, and to plywood.

The FEMA statements are along the lines of "adequate to protect"

I found these via Google search for: "FEMA saferoom design drawings"
But I have not been able to launch the FEMA P-320 .dwg files,
and haven't been able to figure out how to download the .pdf files.

.DWG files are probably "Drawing" files, suitable for reading with an architectural drawing program like Autodesk. Click here to get info on a reader for such files.

Plenty of pictures and info on safe rooms.

At hose prices, a safe room would seem a bit of a no brainer, but human beings are good at wishful thinking and bad at statistics. I've recently seen on TV people in tornado areas saying the didn't think they'd get a tornado because there had never been one just there before, and then see others saying they didn't think they'd get a tornado because they'd had one right there only recently. :right:

If you want something really spooky, do a google image search for "dead man walking tornado".

I heard a story the other day of an elderly couple who got a tornado shelter installed in the floor of their garage under the slab. But they refused to get in the shelter during a tornado warning last week because there was severe hail just as the warning came, and it would mean pulling their brand new Lincoln out of the garage and into the hail so that they could climb down into the shelter. Turns out the tornado never came to their house, and they made the correct decision that day. But placement of the shelter is pretty important. I really like the ones that are built in to the concrete front porch. You just lift up the welcome mat, open the hatch, and climb down inside.

In an ideal world, you would have a large comfortable shelter in the basement where you could sleep when warnings are expected during the night. Instead of going to bed in your upstairs bedroom, you just go to bed in the shelter. That way you don't have to stay awake watching the weather reports as the storms are coming through at 2 am. Virginia is a low risk area, but a couple times a year we'll have storms come through in the middle of the night and there will be associated tornado warnings. I really hate that.

I know the feeling. In Dallas, we lived in a (tornado-lure) mobile home park.
Night-time warnings were really frightening.

One night, we drove to an multi-story parking facility and spent the night
parked on the next-to-top floor, listening to the radio track a storm
from Ft Worth to Dallas.

This is El Reno, OK just 3 minutes ago.... People are being warned to get into shelter NOW !

Another very large (multi-vortex) tornado is occuring near Mulhall, OK (at the center of this map)

9 PM, the winds are active but not real strong.

Washington Post
Chico Harlan 7:00 AM ET
9/3/13

Japan plans to freeze radioactive soil
The next step will be for General Electric to propose building one of their well-designed
nuclear power plants to provide long term power to the refrigeration units.

This disaster in Japan is a disaster that just keeps disaster-ing.

This is quite a long article, but here is the gist ...

The plant was built in an old river bed.
It rains in Japan ... water runs downhill

The company that built this GE reactor did not consider "what if ..."
The earthquake broke underground drainage pipes
The "ice wall" technology is untested and would cost ~ $1 billion
The company is near bankruptcy
The government basically opposes bankruptcy due to effect on economy



Washington Post
Chico Harlan
10/21/13

For Tepco and Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, toxic water stymies cleanup

TEPCO management that created the meltdowns by refusing to vent is also demonstrating same mismanagement with ground water management. If drainage pipes were damaged, then major construction two years ago should have been replacing those pipes. But TEPCO decisions (even to avert the meltdown) have favored business decisions (ie cost controls) rather than what is needed (product oriented thinking). Instead, they spent years looking for and hoping to patch leaks.

Same mismanagement applies to storage tanks. Many storage tanks are now leaking or on the verge of leaking since some tanks were even constructed with plastic bolts. Long term water storage requires welded tanks. TEPCO inaction means they must now build a new tank the size of an olympic swimming pool every day.

Apparently TEPCO believed government would let them dump that water into the ocean. Then discovered that would not be permitted when numerous international NGOs were even monitoring ocean waters. So now they have created more problems traceable to decisions using business school concepts rather than using engineering concepts.

TEPCO, what does heavy structural construction and maintenance, did not even have one ground water specialist in their 40,000 employees.

So many euphemisms in just one little article...

NY Times
HIROKO TABUCHI
November 10, 2013

Removing Fuel Rods Poses New Risks at Crippled Nuclear Plant in Japan
.

I read your excerpt twice and found no euphemisms at all. Care to clarify your point? Or point out my oversight?

Within my post, above
Within the article:

ok, I read all that in the post, got it. I still don't see your point though. I imagine you're suggesting those are the euphemisms you spoke of. and since we're both familiar with the definition of euphemism, what plainer, blunter, more precise and direct language should be used?

How about ....

What point are you making ?
Mine was very simple
... most every sentence and paragraph was written in such styles
which tend to down play or minimize the reader's responses.

My point is that the language in the article is factual and neutral, just how I expect a journalist to convey the information. I find your substitutions not neutral, and some are hyperbolic.

My point, since you asked, is that I like my journalism fair and balanced. I don't like it too bland (filled with euphemisms) or too spicy (filled with inflammatory language). I found the article neutral, fact based and unemotional.

That's part of the reason I try to always give a complete reference to articles I post,
so everyone can read the original writings and decide for themselves.

V, you could have just expressed your feelings in your first posting.
Instead, you played it out, asking for "plainer, blunter, more precise and direct language",
not for language that is "unemotional, balanced, and suitable" for an non-political news article.
What I responded was not (necessarily) the way I would write such a news article.

But part of the reason I have been following the situation in Japan
is a frustration within myself about the future of energy production
For me, it is not un-emotional; instead it is a serious question
with an emotional component, as from the following...

If I assume, and I do, that "global warming" is real and caused primarily by increased C02,
which at this time is caused/aggravated by the activities large, industrial nations, then
where are all the future energy needs going to come from ?

Half of the energy in the US is from coal... that's not a sustainable solution.
Natural gas may be cleaner, but it still yields CO2 ... likewise not a solution
Solar/wind may be feasible but do not seem to me to be efficient enough to meet world needs.
So... right now I tend to agree that nuclear reactors may well become the most likely path followed.

But having lived through 3-Mile Island and Chernobyl in a career of public health,
I believe the general public has been and is being soft-soaped
about the state of the art and the current safety of reactors.

We are seeing this acting out in Fukushima... technically, politically, and financially.
The U.S. and other world authorities are openly expressing doubt about the competence of Tepco.

Yet, of all countries we might expect to do a really great job of engineering for efficiency and safety,
and from the only people who have actually suffered, not one but two, nuclear explosions
on their land, we still see that bad things do happen... really bad things.
Eventually, I'm confident we will learn of men who died working to remedy this disaster.

So when it comes down to it on nuclear power, emotion cannot be left out
just for the sake of being "fair and balanced"

I feel people need the words to enable them to visualize the problems.

Emotion means a reader added information not intended by the author. Maybe 20 different adjectives the author could have used. All mean same to an unemotional reader. Emotional readers assume hidden inferences. For example, think a difference exists between risky and dangerous. If you 'feel' the two words have a different meaning, then you are assuming a perspective that the author did not specifically define.

Unless an author says 'risky' and 'dangerous' have two different meanings, then a reader can only be logical - assume both words define a similar concept.

The report does not even discuss a greater fear and unknown during rod removals. Rods might be cracked or broken. Dropping a rod is not a major fear. Trying to remove a rod that might be shattered or about to shatter (especially when moving it) makes this more dangerous.

This 'dangerous' move from Reactor 4 building is really quite trivial. Much greater risks still remain unaddressed in the other 'melted down' reactors. Peril in reactor building 4 is less compared to the hazards that remain elsewhere. Danger, risk, peril, and hazard are four words that connote same; that define a same threat. Only a reactionary or sensational reader would disseminate confusion or misconstrue meaning by assuming those four words have different implication. Which says: all four words mean same.

tw, please do not miscontrue the quotes.

My sentence does not refer to wording in the NY Times article.

I am the author, not the reader, of the sentence adding "emotion" to my discussion of nuclear power.
As such, it is quite valid for me in include emotion in the discussion... if I so choose.

My discussion of nuclear power came after I responded to a question from BigV,
according to his criteria ("plainer, blunter, more precise and direct language")
My preceding responses to BigV's question were not at all a "re-writing" of any part of that article.

I haven't delved into the background of the original speaker, but in my training in safety assessment of equipment and processes risk and danger (hazard) are two seperate concepts.
Risk is the lilekyhood that an event will occur and the danger is what the result will be if it does occur.
That's not a common perspective, but if the speaker was an engineer then maybe that is how they used the words and a reporter editorialising and substituting would alter the meaning, possibly deliberately.

Quality in engineering does not mean something is good, just that is the same as specified

If perspective or definitions are not provided, then a relationship between risk and danger is read/heard different with each person.

Quality in engineering is not necessarily 'sufficient'. Quality is often defined by what is needed or can be achieved. For example, inductors are measured by a parameter called Q. This Quality factor sometimes must be as high as possible. In other designs, Q has no relevance. The word quality has different meanings based upon perspective.

In production, quality means no quality control inspectors. Quality is defined by employee attitudes. Again, different definitions based in perspective or context.

We worked in facilities with great hazards. Risk and danger often meant same. Both risk and danger were major if something was not confirmed or did not have a safety / backup system.

An example was a welder on the USS Philadelphia who was told to climb under the reactor and cut a pipe. He did not like what he saw so he refused. He was told to go back and cut it anyway. He went back under, again did not like it, and again refused. Had he cut that pipe, he would have flooded the Thames River with radioactivity. To him, no difference between risk and danger.

You may argue that risk is about a future event. And danger is about the present. But to that welder, the difference was irrelevant. Another example of how words have different or same meaning with context or perspective.